Futuristic Guns

[Cosmoline]

POWDER is the key. The last great innovations in firearms all hit when smokeless powder became available in the 1890's and early 1900's. Think about how many modern firearms and cartridges are either called "189x" or "9x" or "'0X" or are derived from such firearms and cartridges. I'd estimate 90% of "Modern" firearms are really firearms from the 1890's and early 1900's dressed up in new packages.

Until something replaces smokeless powder, we will be using the same basic firearms. There's no two ways about it.

I doubt very much that caseless ammo will amount to much. It keeps the bad things about smokeless powder (heat & crud) while taking away the thing that removes most of the heat and crud--the brass.

I'd look to super-high pressure pneumatic systems. Obviously this is a very old idea, but if and when the technology is there for extreme high pressure compressors to be built into the firearm's stock, you can have enormous power without the problems of heat and crud in the chamber.

Also the idea of a liquid powder is interesting. Two elements combine in the the chamber as a liquid in certain amounts, like epoxy glue. The combination is set off and sends the bullet on its way.

 

[Trisha]

In the third novel (I'm +30,000 words into the second book now), I have a weapons technology that goes like this:

Electro-elastomer gunpowder, caseless ammunition, with metal-doped conformal glass bullets that co-generate a recharge pulse for the superconductor (rail-gun technology bore). The weapon will fire effectively to distances of 50 meters without the function of the co-generation pulse, and to 5,000 meters with it.

The co-generation effect changes the characteristics of the glass composite, reducing its sectional cross-density by half (dynamic barrel on the weapon) and is essentially recoiless.

The weapon is most similar to the HALO firearm, save that the caliber is 12.75 X 20mm, with a rate of fire of 500prm in full auto, ballistics of a 300gr round at 1250fps without co-generation and 6,000fps with it. Ignition is either electric or percussive, depending on mode. Sights are self-illuminated ghost-ring or variable-magnification standard telescopic. Weight of loaded weapon is two kilos (w/ full magazine).

Magazines are 100 round rotary (ala Calico), and double as HE frag grenades in an emergency.

A more compact variant of the weapon holds 20 rounds, with 3-shot burst and semi-auto modes, no co-generation capabilities.

In assault forces deployment configuration, the soldier will carry a fanny-pack storage cell that will retain the co-generation energy, making available a 5Gw plasma pulse (charged-particle beam) mode every twenty rounds of standard fire capable of burning through 10 meters of steel, or 20 meters of concrete to a range of 1,000 meters.

Squad weapons will be a 50 X 100mm variant, with a shotgun that uses the same round without the co-generation capability.

This is a work-in-progress guys, go easy, OK? No plagarizing? The piezo-electric-elastomer gunpowder, and room-temperature superconductors have been my best idea to date. . .

Fourteen-hour days at the keyboard? Yep, that's me. Novels are slow going, and loads of fun (though often by the end of the day I have a brain that feels like week-old, cold oatmeal)!

Trisha

 

[ctdonath]

I agree with Cosmoline - powder is very important (we are limited to "+P+" pressures). Yet it is not so much the powder, as the chamber material. Replacing the steel chamber (and barrel) with something able to withstand much higher pulse pressures (ex.: a carbon-fiber material, or a single-molecule polycrystal), perhaps permitting use of actual explosives as propellant rather than a mere burning powder. Imagine/compute the velocity of a 120 grain bullet driven by a cubic centimeter of C4!

 

[Gabe]

I imagine a future weapon that varies projectile velocity as needed. For instance, higher velocity for single shot, and reduced for better controlled automatic fire.

If you take this one step further, instead of a two stage velocity, we could have infinitly variable velocity. A ballistics computer can instantly range the target and put the bullet right where you aim it, no correction for elevation needed at practical ranges.

I can also imagine a revolution in ammunition with the comming of nano-fuelcells. If we can put a tiny battery in each bullet the world changes dramatically. For starters the bullet could emit a powerful electric charge, resulting in instant non-leathal incapacitation no matter the shot placement. A deadly version would simply explode inside the target.

Nano power could also allow us to guide the bullet to target by altering its aerodynamic shape in flight. If we can vary projectile velocity AND mannuvering bullets, even the dullest shooter will never miss. It would be the combination of the assault rifle, the battle rifle, the sniper rifle, and the big game rifle in one.

 

[PaladinX13]

All I'm saying, is if you're going to provide a far flung future where small arms technology is centuries backwards (while all other tech has advanced for over half a millennia)... better have a reason for it. When you read Asimov, Clarke, or whomever... the hardness of the scifi is based on the solidness of the history or backstory provided (Ted Chiang is great at this... creating hard scifi out of "unscientific" elements). I mean if you want to hold tech back it's up to you... BattleTech, for example, uses law to hold back tech (which is why people tromp around in bipedal nuclear powered Mechs versus using cruise missles, etc) "rules of engagement" if you will.

Regarding nanotech... materials nanomachines can make alone dramatically change things. Introduce intelligence into it (no, not sentience... necessarily) and we're talking smart bullets and active armor. That reduces combat to the nanoscopic where it literally is nano-armies waging war.

The biggest thing nanotech affects is the "need" (to the point your heroes are running about guns blazing without being consider a psycho running around with curio medieval weaponry) for small arms to begin with. If the technology is mastered (likely in less than, say, 500 years) Smart Dust, essentially make small arms pointless (at least the way we think of it). NT can border on alchemy. But basically, why rob someone if you can have anything? If you still want to war or commit crime, why do it with small arms? So guns are just recreation then? The First Immortal by James Halperin (despite the cryo cult preaching) shows some of the far flung implications of converging sciences (nanotech, distributed systems/intelligence, and biotech). Prey by Critchton is just a primer on near future effects of the tech along with the glassic grey goo doomsday scenario (and in fact the Smart Dust in Prey is increasingly probable).

With nanotech, asking "How would it possibly affect small arms?" Is like asking "How would chemistry possibly affect swords?" You could go into all the explanations of how it would improve metallurgy, edge retention, etc. but more pertinent would be how chemistry/engineering/etc. enabled firearms to reduce the relevancy of swords.

Like I said, if you want to create a future where there are small arms... by all means. As weird as you may consider the present, in hindsight, you can see how we got here... so an author's gotta provide the fictional hindsight for the reader.

 

[Nightcrawler]

We avoided killing ourselves off with Nuclear weapons. The biological weapons Pandora's Box is still closed for the time being.

So in the future we'll have nanotech weapons. Super.

As for the alchemy part...conceivably if you have nanomachines that can make anything you want, we'll probably develop the technology before we're ready for it. Such things wouldn't bode well with the modern economy.

How far along are they in nanotechnology currently? What perceived uses are they making it for, or are they just making it to see if they can?

But tell me...how do these bacteria-sized machines turn anything into anything? How could they construct solid matter, of various elements? If you're talking about building the particles into the necessary elemental atoms, and then building the atoms into molecules...that's impossible. You can't build something that's subatomic.

 

[Gabe]

When I refered to nano fuelcells I don't mean the molecule sized engins in the far flung future. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say micro power generators.

There are several startup companies working on this right now with working prototypes. These generators are about the size of a watch battery but make enough electricity to power a handphone for a year. A few of these and your laptop will never need recharging. You are going to see lots of interesting things by 2010, like coffee mugs and canteens that boil their own water. Power bullets may not be all that exotic by 2020.

 

[PaladinX13]

Read up more on nanotech (which is a broad misnomer actually), there's too much to summarize here (especially regarding manufacturing). But here are some near future practical applications with impact in regards to small arms.

Shirts that stop bullets (note, written half a year ago, the disclaimer at the end dealing with the cost of nanotubes... which has been making leaps and bounds recently- which is why talk of space elevators, etc. has started. CNT monitors are expected as early as the end of this year and no later than 2006).

Self-Repairing Mutable Camo Mimicking biology, shirts that shift to match their surroundings.

Instant Armor "liquid" metal solidifies when exposed to current.

In say, 20-50 years (if that long) it's not difficult to imagine nanotech enabling them to make the ideal "liquid metal" incased in two layers of Smart CNT all covered in Smart Camo (responding both to environmental and designed inputs).

Regarding the comparison between WMD and nanowarfare... the difference is precision. Nanotech can be programmed to have extremely specific effects (target, range, time, etc.) then self-destruct/convert to vapor when it's done. The main thing capping it might be "rules of engagement"-type system (or MAD, whatever). Traceability is an issue too... so again, it can escalate like traditional warfare down on the nano-scale. You need the right mix of units, scouts, detection, "heavy weapons", "armor", etc. but instead of humans, you've got nanoscopic "bugs" duking it out.

If you don't want to read articles, maybe check out "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson... I haven't gotten around to reading it but I liked "Snow Crash" (and his failed yet "accurate" predictions about computing) and others have said it tackles nanotech well.

 

[mrmeangenes]

Now you made me remember my age !

In the 1940's there was a novel-MAYBE "Gun Shops of Mars"-in which the weapon of choice was the "needle gun", which shot a needle-size projectile at extreme velocity,with practically no recoil. (This WAS science FICTION !)

The writer had evidently read about the .220 Swift,and took the high velocity concept to its (illogical) conclusion.

Can you imagine being in the same COUNTY with someone who touched off a 5000 or 6000 fps load out of a HANDGUN ??

 

[Zak Smith]

Changes in powder design, while still using a combustible propellant, could make a big difference in the projectile velocities available in small arms.

When a cartridge is ignited, the pressure climbs to the maximum allowable pressure and then it falls from then on.

In the above graph, if we assume the maximum allowed chamber pressure is 50,000 PSI, then we are not taking advantage of that whenever the graph is below 50,000.

For example, the chamber pressure reaches 50,000 at about 0.5ms, and then quickly drops to about 10,000 as the bullet exits the barrel. If the pressure curve stayed at 50,000 (or even 40,000) longer, the bullet would exit at a higher velocity, but the load would still "meet" the max pressure limit.

Pressure is what exerts force on the bullet's mass. Momenum is impulse is force*time. So if you find the area under the pressure curve, that will be related to the bullet velocity by a constant ratio. So if you can get 25% more area under the curve by keeping the pressure higher longer, you will get 25% more muzzle velocity.

-z

 

[Penforhire]

One thing to be careful of in your pressure discussion -- If you maintain that peak over a longer duration you exert more absolute force (same PSI over a larger bore area). So a "50K PSI rated" barrel might fail at 50K PSI if the peak were extended.

 

[PaladinX13]

You also have to consider the human element... because it's a brief peak on a "long" (relative to the explosion) impluse, you don't have to worry until you start hitting elephant gun level (in long arms, much less for handguns). If it's at its peak for the entire impluse, you've basically got thrust going on... you're holding a engine facing away from you!

 

[Cosmoline]

Coffee makers boiling their own water! Cool! I may postpone getting power out to the Compound after all!

 

[Zak Smith]

Penforhire & PaladinX13,

You both make good points.

In the last 100 years, the performance of cartridges, say the .30-06, as improved because of powder technology. You can almost always increase muzzle velocity by going to a "slower" powder as long as you have the case capacity available (or a denser powder) and enough barrel to burn it. So we can make incremental improvements without blowing guns up. But I agree that a dramatic improvement would need guns designed for it.

Another problem would be the muzzle pressure. We probably don't want 50kpsi at the muzzle, to put it lightly.

-z

 

[Bog]

I have to say I'm shocked - shocked! that nobody's brought up David Weber's "Honour Harrington" novels in this. They're set a couple of millenia after the Diaspora from Earth, and pretty much all firearms have been replaced by gravitic-tech devices. Imagine railguns, only without the nasty EMP or messy plasma discharged, just using gravity generators to fling slugs/flechettes/hamsters/whatever.

Ergo it's a Known Fact that All Handguns Emit Power. The eponymous Captain Harrington uses this Known Fact to handily whack a bunch of Tangos using a reproduction 1911. If you haven't read this series yet, then the above situation should have you scampering to download "On Basilisk Station" from Baen Free Library - first book in a very well written 10-book series.

Anyhoo... Sci Fi Weapons. Looking at the evolution of computers (geek, geek), they started off as single-use devices - they were Good Word Processors, or Good Music Computers, or Good Game Computers. Now, pretty much all computers (those which are still around) are generalists. They all play games, make music, make pretty pictures, type letters et cetera. Surely future weaponry would adopt some of this flexibility?

We've had variable-velocity mentioned, that's all to the good - being able to go from "Slow load that'll just squich into one person's thickness and fall slowly out the back" through "Smack through a trauma plate and then out" to "Truck Engine Block cracked" is very smart, especially as it means you can use the same gun - and ammo - on an aircraft, in a space station, or from the top of a tall building to plink an eye.

It's interesting that nobody's mentioned the programmable penetration aspects of a weapon - being able to set a slug to self-fragment before hitting a target (flechette effect), inside a target (ewwww but very very sudden kill) or not at all (antimateriél, or when you've got lots of BGs coming for you) strikes me as a Useful Thing. Again, it's flexibility.

If you're using a "Smart Chamber" with a programmable shell, there's no reason you should have fixed firing rates. Using a variable-propellant weapon would imply either pulse-firing (a-la the venerable M41-A1 Pulse Rifle of Aliens fame (the "Pulse" refers to the electrical impulse used to detonate the caseless round)) or something not unlike a Deisel engine where you reach a critical pressure, then "bang". So, much the same as you buy "A Mac" or "A PC", you might conceivably be buying "A Rifle Body" or "A Pistol Body" or "A Carbine Body" - they might be made by 500 different manufacturers, but the "peripherals" - silencers, adaptive optics, active recoil buffers, long-arm counterweights or gyros to stabilise 'em - would all be as standardised as the half-billion video cards we've all got. Yeah, we've got a preferred make (For any video card under $800, give me nVidia any day) - but they all go in the same AGP slot.

Anyhoo... my tuppen'eth....

 

[Nightcrawler]

I don't understand how making a shirt out of carbon makes it available for telecommunications. You're still going to have to put the radio parts in there.

And if it's strong enough to stop bullets..okay, so the bullet goes into the carbon shirt, and deep into you, pulling the shirt with it. And, every ounce of impact energy from the bullet is going to be transferred into your body nonetheless. Effective body armor has to spread out the force of the impact of the bullet.

Say they get the price down from $15,000 an ounce to only $50.00 and ounce. I'm not sure the military's going to buy millions of uniforms at that price.

And the fact that they conduct electricity seems to make the user particularly vulnerable to, say, tasers.

But that's only one small aspect that nanotechnology can provide. Besides, the carbon-shirt doesn't involve nanites in the sense I was thinking of.

But, if armor is nano-tech powered, it can be defeated with EMP. Anything that's electronic can be defeated with a strong enough electromagenetic pulse, I'm given to understand. (Though I'm not really sure how this process works.)

However, active camouflage is something I was already planning to incorporate. You'd likely still be detectable via infra-red or thermal, though.

I think if I ever get to writing my story(ies), I'll be more stylistic and less "realistic". I don't think I want to pull my hair out trying to accurately predict where sciences that are only begging to come out will lead us. 'Sides, it's entirely possible the 2100 "future" will be just as lame as the 2000 "future" was (is).

So then...who wants an 8mm caseless battle rifle? Multifunction optics available, 200 grain bullet at 3000 feet per second. Armor piercing, explosive/light armor piercing, incendiary, and, for $20.00 a round, semi-self-guiding smart rounds. (WARNING: do not use smart rounds when friendly personnel are near your target. They're SMART rounds, not BRILLIANT ones.)

 

[Penforhire]

I've maintained one scary sci-fi theory on the limits of technology:

Some black holes are the result of each advanced civilization's research into particle accelerators, thereby causing self-destruction. According to the dogma I learned, relative mass of a particle increases as it moves faster. So maybe these societies were just built more powerful accelerators than we've made and "black holed" themselves? Scary. One day we could just wink out of existence...

 

[Bog]

So then...who wants an 8mm caseless battle rifle? Multifunction optics available, 200 grain bullet at 3000 feet per second. Armor piercing, explosive/light armor piercing, incendiary, and, for $20.00 a round, semi-self-guiding smart rounds. (WARNING: do not use smart rounds when friendly personnel are near your target. They're SMART rounds, not BRILLIANT ones.)

*Add To Cart*

Ooooh! Dogtags that emit an IFF pulse that sends incoming SMARTshots wild!

*Add to Cart*

*Proceed to Checkout*

 

[Nightcrawler]

Bog raises a very good point.

Even our most sophisticated missiles can be tricked, through countermeasures, radar masking, stealth, chaff, flares, you name it.

You can't out-smart a dumb old bullet, though. You can outsmart it's user, but if he's got a bead on you and fires, no amount of chaff or flares is going to help.

 

[PaladinX13]

I don't understand... *snip*

Read and do the research. Your bullet-proof straw man is scary... com'on, give people with the PhD's a little credit considering the fact they're researching the tech and marketing the application... by this same ridiculous argument we should cast aside all Kevlar and Spectra. Do you know anything about how effective CNTs would be or not at spreading out the force of an impact? No? I didn't think so.... (besides, mixed with the liquid metal tech, you get the best of both worlds... the metal can flood to, stiffen, and act as an impenetrable "air bag").

Are you doing near or far future, make up your mind before your bring cost in as a consideration. Regardless, besides R&D, nano-harvesting (the tech developed by Motorola and being created in parallel by other companies- Samsung, Canon, Toshiba, etc.) becomes essentially "free"... a CNT monitor, for example, is projected to come out at around $1000 for a 50" diagonal (while costing a tiny fraction of that, the price point is R&D plus not killing their current HDTV/Plasma/etc. market). The point is, it's cheap... this is why some almost consider nanotech alchemy.

Regarding conductive... that's inaccurate, they're semi-conductive. They can turn on or off their conductivity (which means the entire fabric can be a giant computer chip- introduce "liquid metal" and some nanites and it would be a liquid, moving, self-healing CPU covering your body)... and, in fact, have a high energy absorption ratio so they would be good defense against tasers, some energy weapons, and EMP. The reason nanotech is taking off is because of advances in biotech... nanites are not mechanical/EMP vulnerable "machines" as much as they are- basically- bacteria, germs, virus, cells, etc. So things like CNT are built by a "germ" (this is a very loose analogy). Anything that kills them is pretty much going to kill you anyways (like radiation) so that's something of a non-issue.

reCamo: If you were going to have active camo anyways then why are you complaining about EMP? Visable light is just another form of radiation, so theoretically, nano-camo should be able to manipulate even IR.

I'm not telling you to pull out your hair, it's probably just my wish fulfillment but I'd like to see more realistic nanotech applications in scifi. But again, it's like trying to forsee telecommunications at the advent of electrical current... we're really in the early (but fruit producing) stages of nanotech.

re:If the current future is lame it's only cuz we got here gradually... our present-day tech is pretty wonderous IMO. Anyways, that's what I was saying about giving the reader fictional hindsight... if it seems like the tech got to where it was naturally then they won't have a problem with it.

 

[Bog]

reCamo: If you were going to have active camo anyways then why are you complaining about EMP? Visable light is just another form of radiation, so theoretically, nano-camo should be able to manipulate even IR.

Energy levels.

Visible Light photons are fairly low-energy - that's why we don't die from 'em. However, the price point (in terms of energy expenditure) goes up geometrically as the wavlength diminishes. That's why most X-ray machines run on five-phase mains, whilst emitting fewer actual photons than a 10-watt bulb.

Fair enough?

 

[PaladinX13]

Bog raises a very good point.

Even our most sophisticated missiles can be tricked, through countermeasures, radar masking, stealth, chaff, flares, you name it.

You can't out-smart a dumb old bullet, though. You can outsmart it's user, but if he's got a bead on you and fires, no amount of chaff or flares is going to help.

Well, by the same token, a knife/sword has no mechanical parts or fancy chemicals to jam or fail... but that hasn't stopped guns from overtaking them on the battlefield. Our "smart" munitions today are actually still pretty "dumb" (not a knock against the engineers who put 'em together, but in regards to target aquisition & decision making). And despite countermeasures, I bet most Air-to-Air kills today come from smart munitions.

But we really ARE creating Brilliant munitions and soon, one day, Genius munitions. Bullets that make intelligent and correct choices. That's again where the convergence of nanotech, compsci (or distributed systems/intelligence.... or AI if you want), and biotech all come into play. If you consider something like a bee- it is extremely brilliant compared to a smart missile... so, roughly speaking, we'd be putting high level intelligence into your bullets... it wouldn't be fooled by something that a "homing" bullet would fall for.

 

[PaladinX13]

Visible Light photons are fairly low-energy - that's why we don't die from 'em. However, the price point (in terms of energy expenditure) goes up geometrically as the wavlength diminishes. That's why most X-ray machines run on five-phase mains, whilst emitting fewer actual photons than a 10-watt bulb.

All true, that still doesn't mean that nanotech can't theoretically camouflage you from IR or even X-rays. Although off the top of my head, they would all require replacement nanites (you would only be able to use the camo in bursts) depending on their regeneration rate & food/fuel supply.

 

[Nightcrawler]

A human being can be fooled, with all of our complicated sensors and such. Given that, I'll bet any computer that we can build anytime soon can be spoofed too. As the technology to make these types of munitions advances, so will the technology to counter them. (At least as much money has been dumped into stealth and radar jamming as has been dumped into making better missiles.) So you'll have weapons, countermeasures, counter-countermeasures, so on and so forth.

I'm always wondering if two technologies can't cancel each other out.

Say you have widespread use of t-shirt body armor. Guns don't work so well, so they make a special armor-piercing gun that defeats the armor. Since the AP guns are widespread, people don't bother to wear the armor anymore, as it's not doing any good. Without people wearing the armor, the AP guns fall in popularity.

Unlikely, but possible, I suppose. I believe artillery will eventually make itself obsolete in such a fashion, though.

As for nanite-induced armor and such, or active nano-camouflage. Will you simply be covered in microscopic machines? I'm really not seeing how tiny robots translate into liquid metal, unless they have the ability to manipulate the molecular structure of matter.

And if nanomachines are biological instead of electronic in their makeup, I'm wondering how you control them, or program them. Do you simply program their intended function into their DNA?

Do you know anything about how effective CNTs would be or not at spreading out the force of an impact? No? I didn't think so....

There's no need to get snippy. They're not talking about liquid metal; they're talking about a super-strong shirt that a bullet can't penetrate. Unless the shirt is going to be as stiff as steel, it's going to move WITH the bullet, in much the same fashion that the Mongols used silk shirts were used to aid in removing arrows. There are no nanomachines involved in the type of carbon tubes they're talking about; it's just a conductive material.

 

[lycanthrope]

I'd like to see hard use, high intensity LED lights integrated into the gun around the muzzle to do away with the clunky Sure-Fire lights. Lasers could also be used.

Able to be done with todays tech.